Messages - pinkpuff

zacmario: thank you for the feedback! I'm working on a stage edit update that will provide a path for the turtles who cant jump as well, though it's tough to avoid giving an easy ledge to attack from. The save feature helps a lot in avoiding getting stuck for the time being, at least.

Glad to hear this is known and being fixed. It was my only significant issue with the hack. I didn't actually end up in the situation where I had only Donatello but it did occur to me while playing that something like that could very easily happen to someone and they shouldn't have to reset just for that.

What about adding ladders to those spots instead of additional ledges? That way Don will still be at a disadvantage as now he has to make himself vulnerable climbing the ladder, but at least then solo Don will technically be completeable.

Also I love up+start for quick-switching of turtles but I'm not so keen on down+start. There are times when I want to pause while crouched (e.g. technodrome hall of death while fighting wave after wave of jetpack guys) but instead I end up insta-changing from one almost-dead turtle to another unexpectedly and get squished.

Otherwise, I absolutely love the hack and I'm glad that serious work is finally being done on this game.

The thing about the chest rarity is that there can only be a maximum of 256 chests among all the overworld maps. If there are 220 overworld floors, then that averages just a little more than one chest per floor. So if you find a floor with a bunch of chests, then you might have to go a few floors before finding a chest again. This is a technical limitation of the rom that is difficult to avoid, especially when I'm trying to use as much of the map space as I feasibly can. At best I can try to make the treasures more valuable; this kind of tweaking will probably happen at a later stage in development, though, since it will have to be different for each content patch.

There is a planned feature in the works that will cause the item purchase prices to be inflated while leaving their sale prices low. It may not end up being applied to the "Pure Vanilla" content (which is what you're looking at right now), but it will be in all the other content patches, including the default one.

The floors with imps is a side effect of my original scheme for assigning monster domains which just blindly assigned them sequentially in numerical order, the way they were in the rom, one per floor, without any regard as to the difficulty curve, whether they were supposed to be overworld or underground encounters, or even whether there were enough of them (there aren't, and that might be related to the glitch you encountered). The current WIP version has that fixed and will be uploaded sometime soon.

On that note, do you know what floor (roughly) you were on when that glitch occurred? I can see it says "L10" but do you happen to know what segment that was, or a rough estimate? The game itself doesn't track the segments, you would have had to count them... although if the bosses were working for you then maybe you can remember who was the last boss battle you fought before that happened? I'm currently trying to get the transition from the overworld to underworld and underworld to moon working so that I can add the rest of the maps (the goal is 300 maps total).

Thank you so much! As a result, I was able to identify the problem and correct it. I have updated the zip, so that should be working correctly now. Let me know if anything like that happens again or if you find any other bugs.

Thanks everyone! Glad to hear people are liking it so far. There's quite a bit left to do though. I don't plan on making any graphic changes, though one can easily patch over it with graphic changes such as the save point tile.

Wow ! Its looking real good and I'm quite impressed by the work. I played a bit this morning and gladly shared the patch with friends However, I got stuck at the second floor with rocks blocking the way to the stairs. Regardless, its pretty cool and cant wait to hear news about your progress !

Even in its current form, that shouldn't be able to happen. I don't suppose you kept a copy of the output rom? If you did would it be possible to post a patch so I can take a look to see what might have gone wrong?

I had originally started a thread about this on the Slick Productions forum, but that site seems to be having issues for the past little while so I thought I'd cross post something about it over here.

The GoalBasically, the idea is to make a "randomizer" of sorts for FF4, except instead of the type of randomizer you usually see that randomizes the treasures and character abilities/appearances and maybe some things about the monsters while leaving the plot and dungeon layouts the same, rather, it would leave the characters and equipment alone for the most part and completely scrap all the plot and original dungeons in favor of a giant dungeon-delve with randomly generated floor layouts, much in the style of roguelike games such as Crawl or Nethack.

Content PatchesAt the beginning of the game, you construct a team consisting of up to five of any of the characters in the game (except FuSoYa, for a variety of reasons). Once you commit to your choice of team, there's no going back; that's your team for the game, short of resetting and starting a new game. In the finished version, there will be several options to choose from in terms of how you prefer the setup of the characters, spells, equipment, monsters, and other game content:

Pure Vanilla: The characters' abilities and progressions, all the equipment, spells, monsters, item prices, all that will be left more or less exactly as it is in vanilla FF4, with the exception that "dummied" items and abilities will be resotred, the characters' starting equipment might be changed, and probably Yang will be given some late-game HP gains. This means the characters will probably be unbalanced, so you can take Edge for an easy time especially through the earlier floors of the dungeon, or dark knight for more of a challenge, especially in the mid to late floors.

Vanilla-Inspired:(Default) The characters will stay more or less true to their original strategies and setups; the only changes made to them and to the equipment will be for the sake of balancing them out so that they will all be somewhat viable from beginning to end, and to help balance them with each other. For example, Salve will be able to use any item for its full effect (or most of it anyway) on the entire party, not just the first potion. Likewise, there will be equipment options for characters like the bard and dark knight to help them throughout the later parts of the game, and the ninja and chief will be brought back down a few levels to start them on par with the rest of the cast.

Unprecedented Crisis: The characters and equipment (and probably the monsters) will be more or less lifted wholesale from Unprecedented Crisis. This means a more radical departure from the original, and some changes that were motivated purely by my own whims rather than necessity, but if you prefer this character setup, the option will be there.

Randomized: This option will let the randomizer shuffle up character abilities and equip skills and deal them out to the characters. You might end up with a Rydia that has Dark Wave, Salve, and Gird. You might have a Paladin that has Cry and Black magic and equips harps, katanas, and spears. The possibilities are endless. Safeguards will be put in place so that if a character is dealt an ability requiring a certain equipment type, it will be guaranteed to have the corresponding equip skill. Otherwise, the sky's the limit.

Current ProgressThere is a somewhat playable demo available, but it is still very raw, as I have really only just begun this project. Currently, the only content option is "Pure Vanilla", as I want to get the basic mechanics of the randomizer working 100% or close to it before I start branching the rom off into other versions to create the patches required for the other content options, because if I need to make any changes to the rom for the sake of the randomizer after I've made those branches, said changes will have to be applied to each rom.

In its current state, the roguelikeifyer will allow you to set up a team at the beginning. The descriptions it gives of the characters are for the "Vanilla-Inspired" content, but that hasn't been implemented yet, so you can ignore those descriptions for now.

It will create 11 "segments" of 20 floors each. Each floor in the segment is randomly constructed and randomly littered with treasures and the odd NPC. Each floor has an "exit" door and a "warp" door, except the first floor of each segment which has a save point instead of a warp back. Each segment ends with a boss fight. The random encounters gradually increase in difficulty as you progress from one floor to the next.

Currently, the dungeons are a little sparse and all have the same tileset, so it's a little dull in that respect right now, but remember it's still in the sort of proof-of-concept stage; I plan to add more content and tilesets after I get the underlying mechanics all working correctly and debugged.

InstructionsApply the patch "FF4RL Base" to a FF2US v1.1 UN-headered rom. Then, rename the resulting rom file "test.smc" (I'm a very lazy puff). Finally, run the executable "FF4Roguelikeifyer". A black screen may flash up briefly; ignore it. The resulting test.smc rom should then be randomized and ready to play around with.

It seems as though a combination of work, other commitments, and other projects have taken over my ability and drive to work on FF4kster. However, I would feel bad if I were to abandon it completely; thus, I leave it in the capable hands of the community. I have uploaded the entire source code to Github for people to edit, add, subtract, remake, take over completely, do whatever they see fit with it.

I can't really help much with graphics, but I'd be happy to answer any questions you have regarding events.

On that note, Bahamut Zero is 100% on the mark with regard to the "mini Cecil" problem. This is caused by the "change character graphic" command. If the game encounters this instruction and the person it's supposed to change to isn't in your party, it will change you into something strange (usually a mini but I seem to recall seeing pigs before as well). Delete that command and you're good to go.

Events can be a little tedious, especially if they involve a lot of moving dudes around the screen. In the map editor, you can check the (x, y) coordinates of different tiles and that can help somewhat, but for the most part, you kind of have to just imagine the actions playing out in your mind, and that may or may not line up with how they actually move around when you run it. It can also complicate things when you have to move multiple characters at the same time using the "do the next x actions y times" instruction, especially if you go back and delete or insert some movements, as you have to make sure your parameters are still accurate.

Despite all that though, I found that when making new events, it was fun and rewarding to see them in action.

Oh, another tip for later is to set aside an event to use as a sort of "debug event" that you can use to warp your party right next to an event you want to test and set up all the appropriate plot flags, inventory, etc. that are expected for that event. It saves a lot of time when testing events in the middle of dungeons. You can also do things like use the map editor to drop a save point right before the event you want to test and then delete it when you're done if you prefer to play through normally rather than warping straight there.

This is the easiest way:1. Open RAM Search in FCEUX or any cheat search functionality in any other emulator.2. Make the game play any music or silence.3. Start search.4. Make the game change the music or silence to something different than before.5. Continue search for *modified* values.6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 until you're left with very few RAM addresses.7. Create a cheat to modify that RAM address to the value of silence (usually 0).

When I tried this I couldn't quite get an address that corresponded to the track that was playing. Maybe I'm doing it wrong?

EDIT:Pfft. Nevermind, I was doing it wrong. I found it. 10A, 10B, 10C, and 10D. Froze those at 0, boom. Music gone, sound effects intact. Thanks everyone for your help!!

I'm trying to acquire the sound effects from the first TMNT game for NES (the Ultra one).

I was unable to find any existing sound files that anyone else had already ripped so I tried my best to accomplish this on my own. I discovered that if you pause immediately after beating a "mini-boss" just as the victory music starts to play and let the music finish in the pause screen, when you unpause, it will still wait to start the regular stage music back up, during which time you can record the sound effects "manually" without the music playing in the background.

Unfortunately, this method can only go so far. There are some things it is difficult or may even be impossible to record in such a situation. For example, as the game does not allow the screen to scroll during this time, and it will not play the victory theme until all enemies on screen have been defeated, I don't think it's possible to record the "enemy damage" or "enemy destroyed" sounds this way. "Get item" would likely be extremely challenging as well. Not to mention any sound effects that are exclusive to the intro, cuscenes, and/or the overworld.

Is there any known method for extracting sound effects from an NES file in general, or any ideas for how to accomplish a similar result for this game in particular?

He's not looking for Tellah. What you're seeing is an artifact of using the original config file. The actor that in Unprecedented Crisis is Kain 3 is the actor that in vanilla FF4 was Tellah 3. To account for the situation where Kain is in mid-jump when the Shadow dragon does his main chain, he should switch to a mode where he just spams demolish. It could be that there's something making him immune to Demolish... the new Aegis shield comes to mind. I might have to nerf its KO resistance to get that battle to work.

Glad you enjoyed it otherwise though.

EDIT: Removing KO immunity from the Aegis shield seems to have done the trick. Version 2.1 has now been submitted. I highly reccommend anyone who has 2.0 to download 2.1 once it's approved (your saves should be compatible; you won't have to start a new game).

I'm afraid I can't replicate your issue and thus can't address it. Unless this is happening to other people as well, I'm going to say that most likely there was a problem with the patching process. Check your original rom's checksums against the ones listed on the hack project page. In addition, check that your rom is unheadered.

Kain: I'm aware of this one. It's surprisingly difficult to fix. I gave up after a while and figured it was minor enough to leave alone. I might take another stab at it before releasing version 2 but no guarantees.

Rosa: I was sure I fixed that. Since you mentioned you accepted a character into an already full party and since no one else has reported this, I'm going to blame it on that for now, but I will look into it.

Yang: This is definitely the result of trying to take him into a full party. It causes all sorts of untold strangeness. This will not be possible to do in the next version as it will be able to automatically detect your party size and will not even present you with the choice.

The new character swapping will actually be removing the yes/no boxes. All those triggers are pretty near a save point, so if you don't like the result you can reset and not lose any progress worth speaking of.

I did the NPC thing in FF - 1 but that one had a lot fewer armors. Also I don't know of a way to have them say that without it sounding cheesy. The little girl in Toroia says something about blood/cursed equipment but that's about as good as I can do. I think Grimiore is working on a text file that lists all the items and their properties. I can package that with the next version.